Ireland's land obsession: ‘There's something about having and owning. I see a fixation on that, and I feel it in myself'

Irish Times

11-05-2025

At the top of a hill in Shandon, on Cork's northside, on a sunny Monday afternoon, it's womb-like inside Firkin Crane dance centre, where they're working on the precise mechanics of scorching the earth.
Upstairs in the versatile performance studio the raked seating is up, exposing the full mirrored wall, as five performers, including the dancer, choreographer and writer
Luke Murphy
, literally go through the motions.
His
Attic Projects
team is creating Scorched Earth, a big dance-theatre show that's premiering at the Abbey this month as part of
Dublin Dance Festival
, then going on to
Galway International Arts Festival
in July. Inspired by John B Keane's powerful play The Field, it involves a murder, an interrogation, the ghosts of an unsolved cold case, fantasy, fear and the centrality of land and ownership to the Irish psyche.
Scorched Earth is the biggest show yet from Murphy and Attic, who in 2021 created
Volcano
, a startling, exciting, two-handed psychological sci-fi thriller that won four Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, including for best production. Alyson Cummins (set and costume), Rob Moloney (music, sound), Stephen Dodd (lighting) and Patricio Cassinoni (AV) are an amazing design team to be working with, Murphy says.
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At today's rehearsal he's doing a rough run-through of the drama and movement in the middle section of Scorched Earth with the dancers Ryan O'Neill, Sarah Dowling, Tyler Carney-Faleatua and Will Thompson. Already you can see and feel the shape and tone. It's set in an interrogation room, with other spaces and scenes visible through a window; today that's a bench with radio mics. Central to the rehearsal is a large, sturdy desk on wheels, which functions in a variety of intriguing ways, as the audience will discover.
But first they're reworking a new transition, a change on foot of a run-through on Friday. 'Sometimes things just aren't the right thing at the right time,' Murphy says. This involves a very careful breakdown of the precise movements of one section within an interrogation scene, where it seems to become dreamlike or go into another zone. One body tumbles, rolls over the other and on to the floor; all five performers interlace.
Snatches of radio and soundscape are rewound over and over as the performers and crew work through and synchronise the movement, dialogue and sounds. 'You have to scorch the earth to clear it,' is a key line.
Scorched Earth by Luke Murphy/Attic Projects at Dublin Dance Festival 2025 and Galway International Arts Festival 2025. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski
This finished section is probably about a minute long when they've got it how they want it; it's a window on to their building blocks.
Murphy is both directing and performing. At one point he asks Dodd, the lighting designer, to sit in for him in the scene, in which he's on a chair as the others thread around and over him. Murphy hunkers down to watch. There's an easy intensity, and visible respect, care and trust, as everyone engages: who'll push this chair out of the way, who'll hold that body as it moves.
Then, in the 'radio studio', 'let's make it a little more pedestrian here, like how you bop around on your own when you brush your teeth to a song you like.'
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Afterwards they slot these minute parts into the longer midsection, and it all makes sense. Several things happen at once. Radio crackle, effects, original music (audiovisual projections come later), theatrical dialogue and plot interwoven with tumbling, moving bodies, precise and delicate but also muscular.
Then they break for lunch. Murphy sits to chat. He's quietly spoken and gentle but sure, confident in his vision.
The story's context is Ireland's history of 'land-based crimes'.
'In the world of our show, that has led to a public inquiry, and the Green Report, which sees a pattern linking violent crime in Ireland with ownership, possession and land. That has led to Detective Kerr exploring these cases. She opens a cold case from 15 years ago and pulls the suspect from that time into a room for interview about an unsolved murder. The set-up of that crime she's exploring is inspired by the story of The Field.'
It's not an adaptation of Keane's play about Bull McCabe and the violence triggered by the strength of his feelings about the land he rents. 'I hope it reflects the respect I have for that story, and feels like a kind of love letter to it.'
I see it in my family. I see it everywhere around me. The relentlessness of news cycles about crimes to do with ownership, land, rights of way, inheritance. It's just right there to see
—
Luke Murphy
Scorched Earth's case involves a person who bought a piece of land and died soon afterwards, apparently accidentally. The cold case is re-examined, and the current owner, who had been renting the land at the time of the death, is the suspect, played by Murphy. Other characters are the detective, the victim, the original sergeant and a radio presenter.
The setting is ambiguous. 'It's clearly Ireland, but we don't have placenames.' Murphy thinks about his work as often 'a little bit outside of time'. Sometimes it feels as if it's the late 1980s or early 1990s, a bit Celtic Tiger. 'There's references to when money flooded into the country, and building and infrastructure and developing and owning became a kind of frenzy. The world of the interrogation room sits in this liminal space.'
The interrogation rehearsal involves the suspect asked to recall incidents, and 'what happens to them under pressure, as they're faced with that past'.
Scorched Earth: Luke Murphy and Theo Arran. Staged by Luke Murphy/Attic Projects at Dublin Dance Festival 2025 and Galway International Arts Festival 2025. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski
Murphy talks about how 'there's something about having and owning, what's yours and not yours. I see fixation on that in Ireland, and I feel it in myself.' He recalls living in a terraced house in Cork, where his neighbour painted slightly across the edge of the gutter, on to his house – 'this sense of threat that comes with that.'
He observes versions of it in west Co Cork too. 'I see it in my family. I see it everywhere around me. The relentlessness of news cycles about crimes to do with ownership, land, rights of way, inheritance. It's just right there to see. There are highly documented cases.'
But 'the power is in the idea of the story' rather than being a documentary or a true-crime show. We have historical scars about land ownership, both in Ireland and globally. 'What having or retaining something, the sense of righteousness around what is yours, and what that causes people to do, feels really pertinent to be curious about right now.'
Scorched Earth is 'close to home'. He's exploring 'the cost, and the tragedy of that cost. There's a darkness to how far you'd go to vindicate this ownership.'
Murphy has been 'sitting with this idea for five or six years. It's been a long, long gestation process.' He diverted development funding awarded in 2019 into making the four episodes of
Volcano
; when Covid hit, a big show with a large cast wasn't possible, so he pivoted, rehearsing a two-hander in a livingroom.
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But Scorched Earth re-emerged. He had early rehearsals in 2022, then further development in 2024, working with his script and a cast for five weeks. 'We made a 90-minute show last year, and I threw away 75 per cent of it. Took the whole thing apart and started over, created a new structure and a new script.' Now more than halfway through rehearsals, 'structurally, we're very, very close. Now it's just about us getting our performance up and confident.'
Murphy grew up in St Patrick's Hill, 10 minutes' walk from where we're sitting. His father's family has farms outside the city, and 'I spent a lot of weekends and every holiday out in the last village in the smallest peninsula in west Cork, in Kilcrohane,' he says.
'I absolutely love it down there. I love the landscape. I love the way the rocks come through the grass. I love you can see every bit of land that's usable there is usable because so much work went into it' to be able to live from it. There's a 'sense of what you've earned, as well. That's all part of what drew me to the story. I don't think you can look at land and violence in Ireland without coming back to The Field. It's such a seminal story in the canon of narratives.'
He mentions the film version's opening shot, 'this postage stamp' of land, and how 'there's a place in Kilcrohane, on the north of the peninsula. There's the natural way the landscape wants to be. And then, right near the sea, someone has etched out this beautiful probably two-acre bit of land on a really steep incline. It's so lush. The green is so vibrant.
'I love that image. It's hidden, way over, very underpopulated. I have no idea who takes care of it. It's gorgeous.'
Murphy recalls walking out there, maybe around 2017, and his father, Patrick, saying it reminded him of The Field. He thinks that was the germ of the idea.
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He finds legal definitions of ownership interesting, how an individual's right involves exclusive use, excluding others. Wanting to have something that's ours, 'because we didn't have anything that's ours' in the past. 'I want this to be mine. I deserve this to be mine. Part of that means I want to make sure no one else can have it. That's an interesting theme right now where Irishness is being asked to broaden in so many ways, and is broadening.'
Murphy made other shows while this idea formed. This is his 14th show since 2013, his largest, thematically and in production. 'Ideas for shows cross over, drift, fly around. One big thing becomes another, and the show you make is far away from your first idea. Where we've ended up is really, really exciting, but I couldn't have dreamed of this in one go.'
He shows me his theatrical script: dialogue, descriptions of movements, music and visuals, plus rehearsal video-links. His notebook – 'the chaos of my mind' – has notes and hieroglyphics, most recently for the new movement bridge they just tried out.
'This sits very much between a play and a dance show. There's a load of dancing in it. Also, it's very narrative. A lot of words. There's five characters and a clear journey for each of them.' It's 'more a whydunit than a whodunit. I don't think we keep the audience in huge suspense over whether this person is guilty.'
The cast are trained dancers, with theatre experience. Often, dancing someone else's show, 'you have strings on your bow that people aren't interested in, because the choreographer wants to use you for something specific. Making a show, I like to say, we're going to do the things you can do, and we're also going to do the things you can't do, and we're going to learn how to do them.
Scorched Earth: Luke Murphy. Staged by Luke Murphy/Attic Projects at Dublin Dance Festival 2025 and Galway International Arts Festival 2025. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski
'Inside the space it's very open. There aren't lanes. Everyone is invited to have opinions or input on everything. But, logically, it has to make sense for me first, or I don't know how to put it together with belief.'
For this, 'I've challenged myself to be a better writer'. He trusts people around him. He laughs, quoting the American comedian Bill Hader: 'If two people tell you you have a problem, always listen, because that means you have a problem. And if anyone tells you a solution, don't listen, because only you can figure out the solution for your own work. It's such a great quote.'
Murphy is very happy with how it's shaping up. 'Every piece you make you believe in; you put everything into it. You have no control over how that's received. I'm always really confident, and I really believe in what I'm doing. We're working really well. When the culture of the room is good, everything normally kind of works out.'
Though known as dancer and choreographer, Murphy grew up doing more theatre than dance. He wrote films all through college, did a minor in creative writing. His late mother, Maeve Saunders, was 'a huge theatre enthusiast, and participant. She wrote radio plays, ran an arts magazine. I grew up in a house where theatre was really, really highly valued. And she loved dancing' – ballroom and, later, line-dancing. 'It was a house with a lot of dance.' His father is an electrical engineer – 'it makes sense when you see some of the sets' – with 'huge appreciation of culture'. His sister, Hannah Murphy, is a historian.
Knowing he wanted to be a performer, he set his sights at the age of 15 on boarding at
Bede's
, an English school with excellent theatre and dance, 'like Hogwarts for performing'. Murphy's parents were supportive, agreeing to it if he got a scholarship but thinking that unlikely, as he had applied very late. 'I was always very determined about what I wanted to do. And it was absolutely amazing, just wonderful. It was a really, really great two years.'
Afterwards, finding no college offering both theatre and dance, 'it was on a dime' which one he would follow. 'I chose dance, because of stigma around your shelf life as a dancer being shorter.' At
dance conservatory
in Pittsburgh, at the age of 18, the city felt familiar, 'like the American version of Cork, this working-class city, lots of sports'.
Conservatory training is 'all about technique, what the body says and what your body can do. I felt like that other side of me was kind of pressed into non-existence through conservatory training, in a way that actually held me back.'
After college, at
Punchdrunk
, the London-based immersive-theatre company, he was encouraged to bring his theatre side forward again: 'Don't lose that – that's a part of who you are.' It's where Attic Projects' name comes from, 'not letting things sit up there, gathering dust. If there's something you want to do, bring it down' and do it.
The way he works now is 'very far from' his conservatory training. 'I feel I'm just getting closer and closer to what I really am good at, or what's really specific about what I'm able to do ... using all the experience from my whole life.'
Before Volcano Murphy had 'shied away from' explicit narrative, but its TV format 'pulled me over there ... I don't know why I was so scared to do this.'
Scorched Earth feels like a further development. It's made in Cork, like Murphy himself. He hopes it will play there too. It's designed with touring in mind. He was in New York for six years after Pittsburgh, then Brussels for three. 'I only really moved back here properly in 2020.'
He always came back for projects, performed his shows in the city. He lives in Cobh, near the sea. 'I really like working in Cork. I'm that classic Cork person who thinks Cork is just brilliant. And it feels like the right pieces are in place for me to be able to do what I want to do here.'
Scorched Earth is at the
Abbey Theatre
, as part of
Dublin Dance Festival
, on Friday, May 23rd, and Saturday, May 24th, and at Black Box, as part of
Galway International Arts Festival
, from Tuesday, July 15th, until Saturday, July 19th